Virtualization news from VMware and the community of virtualization users, including the VMware Communities and VMTN, the VMware Technology Network.

Monthly Archives: August 2009

It seems to be cucumber time as we call it in the Netherlands, for those unfamiliar with the term check wikipedia. A lot of news posts but a lot of repetive info. I guess a lot of bloggers are on a holiday, especially the dutch bloggers have been awful quiet lately. I did however manage to find 5 great articles again. Read them and leave a comment at the source articles as this is fuel for new content.

Scott Lowe - UCS Class Wrap-UpLast week’s partner boot camp for the Cisco Unified Computing System
(UCS) was very helpful. It has really helped me gain a better
understanding of the solution, how it works, and its advantages and
disadvantages. I’d like to share some random bits of information I
gathered during the class here in the hopes that it will serve as a
useful add-on to the formal training.

Simon Gallagher - VMware ESX 5As the VMware vendor and partner ecosystem grows will it stifle
growth in the core product? – I see this happening with Microsoft –
they don’t want to produce an all singing and dancing core product as
there are literally thousands of ISV’s that they don’t necessarily want
to put out of business; so Microsoft core products are “good-enough”
but for more advanced features you turn to an ISV (think Terminal
Services & Citrix)So, open question really – here’s my starter for 10 – What would you like to see in ESX 5?

Duncan Epping - Primary and Secondary nodes, pick one!Now that makes you wonder what else is possible… Lets start with a
warning. I don’t know if this is supported. Lets assume it is not. Also
keep in mind that the supported limit of primaries is 5, I repeat 5.
This is a soft limit, so you can manually add a 6th, but this isnot supported. Now here’s the magic…

Daniel Eason - Virtualisation within today's IT FrameworksVirtualisation and the underlying technology that supports the virtual landscape is deployed as a point solution, this is also the case for the example technologies that are changing the shape of datacentres, you procure them and you can solve common datacentre problems. Virtualisation ecosystems as in the software and components that you can deploy however can reduce your process by default and with very little need to implement any fandangle add on or interfaces, however you still need to ensure that this potential is exploited correctly.

Chris Wolf - Catalyst Server Virtualization Wrap-up Part I / 2After taking the weekend to catch my breath and get some much needed rest, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the highlights from last week’s Catalyst North America conference. I’d like to start with recaps of last week’s opening day cloud and virtualization sessions.

I wanted to write a huge article on why you should attend VMworld. Before I started writing I decided to do a search on PlanetV12n and the amount of articles that came up was so overwhelming that I decided to link them instead of writing yet another post on why to attend VMworld. If these guys can not convince you no one can:

Duncan Epping - High Availability Deepdive, the updateA VMware HA Cluster consists of nodes, primary and secondary
nodes. Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all “node states” which
are synchronized between primaries. Node states hold for instance
resource usage information. In case that vCenter is not available the
primary nodes will have a rough estimate of the resource occupation and
can take this into account when a fail-over needs to occur. Secondary
nodes send their state info to the primary nodes.

Arnim van Lieshout - How big is my VM?To make things more complicated, these files can be stored on
different datastores. So if you want to know how much storage is
occupied by your vm, you have to add up all these file’s sizes. I created a little Powershell function to help me out on this one.
In its simplest form a vm consists of one or more directories. This
script first creates an array with all directories occupied by the vm
and then adds up all the file’s sizes in these directories. Just feed
the function with a vm object and it will return the vm’s total size in
bytes.

Steve Chambers - Drummonds vs Crosby on virtualization performanceThis week, Scott delivered another great performance at the Burton
Conference where he provides the hard data in contrast with Simon
Crosby’s conjecture. If you haven’t seen Scott present yet and
your work involves virtualization, well that’s like being a blues fan
and never seeing B.B. King live.

Rich Brambley - Detailed P2V Analysis Flowchart for the “Fruit in the Canopy”Virtualization can be credited for popularizing the phrase “low hanging
fruit” as a referral to the set of physical servers so underutilized
they are easy virtualization candidates. Now, as virtual
infrastructures (VI) mature and larger, more resource intensive
applications are being considered for physical to virtual (p2V)
migrations, administrators and application owners need to figure out
how to adapt existing VI designs to accommodate the “fruit” still left
in the “tree canopy”.

Richard Garsthagen - vAudit 1.00Thanks to Jeff and Sudharsan for your feedback! I just made a new version available of vAudit with 3 new improvements:- vAudit now also checks for login failures, so you can detect if people are trying to hack into your system- You can now resize the username column, so you can actually read the username if you have long domain names- When you MouseOver a session, it will display the machine name and time information